In the early hours of 17 July 1918, Bolshevik revolutionaries marched the Russian Imperial family — Tsar Nicholas II, his empress and their five children — and their staff down to the cellar of the house in which they were living in exile, in Ekaterinburg, and shot and bayonetted them to death.
When Josef Stalin rose to power in the 1920s and when the Soviet Union was established in 1922, all discussion of Russia's last Imperial family – either printed or in public – was banned. In the new socialist state, religious faith and practice, or any nostalgia or veneration of the Romanovs, was forced underground by the ruling Communist Party's favoured policy of “state atheism”.
